"THE SPECTER OF COMMUNISM":  WHY AMERICA FOUGHT THE COLD WAR
	CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Dec. 9 -- With the Cold War over and
historians trying to understand fully the complex dynamics of the
dangerous standoff between the superpowers, new information about
the views and intentions of Communist leaders is emerging from
archives in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China.  A
new book by University of Virginia diplomatic historian Melvyn P.
Leffler, who last year won several of his field's major prizes for a
groundbreaking study of U.S. Cold War policy, is the first to
synthesize these recent findings into a concise analysis of how the
enormously costly confrontation began.
	Leffler's "The Specter of Communism:  The United States and
the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-53," just out from Hill and Wang,
shows the Soviet leader Stalin to have been, if anything, more
ruthless and cynical in his policies regarding his own people than
was previously known.  But, paradoxically, says Leffler, Stalin's
brutality and ideological opposition to the West did not result in a
consistently revolutionary foreign policy or at programs designed to
achieve worldwide Communist domination.
	Rather, in Leffler's analysis, Stalin ranged between caution
toward the West and "pragmatic opportunism" aimed at keeping the
Soviet Union strong.  But the very unpredictability of his moves to
safeguard Soviet security added to American fears and anxieties,
which in turn helped fuel the Cold War.
	Although Leffler concludes that U.S. policy to fight
Communism had to follow the overall direction it did, he makes clear
it had its own inconsistencies that resulted in the arms race's vast
drain on the economy.  "The strategy was coherent, but some of the
underlying assumptions were flawed," he writes. "Although American
fears were exaggerated, they were nonetheless
understandable....Although a good case could have been made that
Stalin was more prudent than Hitler in the conduct of foreign
policy, no one could have been sure of it."
	Leffler's previous book, "A Preponderance of Power," won the
1993 Bancroft Prize as the best book on American history and
received several other top U.S. history prizes.  Both that book and
the new analysis, which was written partly during a fellowship at
the Nobel Peace Institute in Norway, have drawn extensive praise
from historians representing a wide range of views on the origins of
Cold War tensions. 
	Leffler says the groundwork for the Cold War was laid from
the very beginning of the Soviet Union, with the Bolshevik
Revolution in 1917.  But "ideological hostility was not translated
into a sense of mortal danger until Soviet armies helped defeat Nazi
Germany and occupied much of Eastern Europe.  The Cold War took
shape when a sense of ideological rivalry merged with fear of Soviet
power." 
	"The fusion of ideological competition with geostrategic
threat was what made American officials keenly sensitive to the
vulnerability of their domestic political and economic
institutions," he writes.  U.S. leaders concluded early on that they
could not preserve individual liberties and a private market economy
in a world dominated by totalitarianism, "even if those powers
refrained from attacking the United States."
	"After 1945 American policy-makers were afraid not so much
of the prospect of premeditated Soviet military aggression as of
Soviet capabilities to capitalize on postwar vacuums of power in
Germany and Japan, socioeconomic dislocation in Europe and
decolonization in the Third World."  It was conceivable, though in
Leffler's view unlikely, that the Soviet Union could gain a position
in Eurasia similar to what the Axis powers had sought.
	But America's anxious determination to protect its freedom
and prosperity does not alone explain why this country waged the
Cold War as it did, Leffler says.  An added element was that
anti-Communism "resonated with the American people. It provided a
framework for understanding a complicated world with which few
Americans had much experience."
	A wide variety of groups and interests quickly saw that they
could manipulate anti-Communism to serve their own limited domestic
goals, Leffler points out.  He outlines how business, religious,
patriotic and other groups vigorously supported the Cold War, even
though they were little interested in the Soviet Union or world
affairs.  Southern segregationists used anti-Communist fears to try
to slow the advance of the civil rights movement, and politicians
soon grasped its appeal, culminating in the witch-hunt mentality
best represented by Sen. Joe McCarthy.
	To protect its way of life, the United States tried to
reorganize most the world into an American-led pattern, Leffler
says.  This involved rebuilding Western Europe and coopting the
potential new strength of Germany and Japan, in order to integrate
the industrial core of Eurasia with its underdeveloped periphery in
Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.
The overriding goal was to contain the spread of Soviet power and
Communist influence.
	The new material from archives offers revealing glimpses of
what the Communist leaders themselves were thinking and fearing,
especially Stalin.  And it is clear that the Soviet leader "was more
intent on promoting the security of the Soviet Union, in an
opportunistic manner, than in promoting worldwide revolution,"
Leffler says.  Not only did Stalin break with the Yugoslav dictator
Tito over the latter's advocacy of world revolution, but he also
refused to risk sending Soviet troops into the Korean War and was
initially slow to support the Chinese revolution.  Even in parts of
Eastern Europe he didn't at first support revolutionary forces at
the end of World War II.
	Soviet archival documents show that at the end of World War
II Stalin often didn't have coherent ideas of what he wanted,
Leffler says.  This made it hard for U.S. officials to do anything
but fear the worst, and thus they took action to configure a balance
of power favorable to U.S. security interests and compatible with a
free political economy.
	With Stalin's death in the spring of 1953 the United States
and Soviet Union had an opportunity to change the Cold War
arrangement.  But, uncertain of what risks might lie in pursuing
more accommodating policies, "both sides decided not to do so. Both
sides had become comfortable with the Cold War," Leffler says.  They
were already locked in the long struggle that led through the
Vietnam tragedy and the arms race and finally to the collapse of the
Soviet Union itself.
	There is an irony and paradox in the Cold War that some
thoughtful Americans saw at the time, Leffler adds.  It was that in
trying to prevent becoming "a garrison state" against a
world-dominant totalitarianism and to avoid having to curtail
economic and political liberties, the U.S. began to take on some of
those very characteristics.  The Cold War brought the growth of the
military industrial complex and the direct intrusion of such
agencies as the CIA and FBI into people's lives, and even secret
radiation tests on American citizens. 
	The Cold War "triumph was not without significant costs," he
concludes.  The costs included the overburdening of the American
economy in relation to its allies, the divisive turmoil at home
during the McCarthy and Vietnam eras, and the deaths of millions of
people in the Korean and Vietnam wars.  The Cold War is over, but in
waging it, Americans' principal aim was not a totally benevolent
one.  It was, says Leffler, "not so much to help others as to
protect themselves from the specter of Communism."
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December 8, 1994
Melvyn Leffler may be reached at (804) 924-3478.